Pastoral Letter of Most Rev. John Murphy, Archbishop
of Cardiff (Wales).

It is hard to give tongue on any subject these days
without being immediately labelled. And this is particularly true in all
the discussions, disputes and differences which have arisen since
Vatican II. One is immediately classified as either progressive or
reactionary, liberal or conservative, gathering or scattering. Everyone
must stand up and be counted. Even the uncommitted find themselves
assigned by unsolicited editing to one camp or the other; there is no
middle of the road. And the normal Catholic who wants nothing else save
to obey the Church and fulfil all that the Catholic Faith demands of
him, finds himself, willy nilly, faced with a choice, It was all so
simple before. Now everything is involved, and he has to be personally
committed. Although the actual combatants in this golden age of
theological journalism are few, and their active followers even fewer,
all the People of God are conscripted into the ranks with the usual
stock phrases, "No Catholic in tune with this post-conciliar
age," or alternatively, "No Catholic with any reverence for
the past." Actually, the normal Catholic has no desire to be
unfaithful either to the post-conciliar age or to the traditional past.
He just wants to do the right thing. But he is offered some startling
contrasts which cannot both be right. "Do I follow the
Church?" or "Do I follow my own conscience?" says the
bewildered Catholic. The range of goods on the theological counter with
everything from the celibacy of the clergy to the pill has never been so
wide, never so bewildering.

"It had to happen"

Where does the normal Catholic stand in all this?
What must he make of it? It will help us in resolving this dilemma if we
keep firmly in our minds two fixed points. In the first place, no matter
how progressive, how reactionary or how middle-of-the-road we may be, we
must keep on repeating to ourselves a simple truth; "it had to
happen". All the changes, all the accommodations, all the
reappraisals, all the mental adjustments which we ourselves have had to
make painfully during the last few years, all this a necessary adjunct
of Vatican II. It had to happen; it could not have been avoided. It
should not have been avoided. But having said that, we must likewise
keep on telling ourselves another truth even more important, that none
of these things needed to happen in the way they did, with a cleavage of
loyalty, a revolt against authority, a revolt against tradition, a
setting up of conscience against the Church. None of these things ever
arose, or were part of Vatican II. The grass roots of Vatican II never
produced that cockle. None of that can be blamed on the Holy Ghost or
Vatican II.

True and false ecumenism

How, then, did it all happen? It arose in this way.
Vatican II had placed upon us all the necessity of restating Catholic
doctrine in a way which carried a meaning to contemporary society. There
were all sorts of reasons for this. But the primary reason was that of
compassion and love. The Church, like Christ, had compassion on the
multitude. It wanted to share its treasures with the world. It realized
that the Church and the world had drawn apart and were speaking a
different language. Pope John had prepared the way for this, and the
Council was an acceptable time for implementing it, offering the truth
to the world in its own language and without rubbing their noses in it.
The whole ecumenical movement was born of this compassion, a sincere and
lively compassion. But its very compassion, if misplaced, could be its
worst enemy. We carry the precious gift of the Faith in frail ecumenical
vessels, and any false concealment, any false accentuation born of false
compassion, and we have a heresy on our hands. The ecumenist who,
knowing that a particular truth of the Faith carries little meaning or
conviction to contemporary man, thereby plays it down or conceals it,
instead of painfully searching for a language which would be relevant,
is a false shepherd who feeds nobody but frightens everybody. He may not
have angry sheep on his hands, but he still has hungry ones. "Send
her away for she crieth after us" said the Apostles to Christ
concerning the Chanaanite woman. But it was a false compassion and a
false ecumenism. They were more concerned with saving her embarrassment
than with giving her the Faith and the miracle she asked for. Christ, on
the contrary, appears to be cruel and to be baiting her. "I am not
sent but to the sheep that are lost of the house of Israel;"
"It is not good to take the bread of the children and to cast it to
the dogs", he says; all positively rude and unecumenical, and for
the moment we are almost ashamed of the truth and of Christ. But in the
end, it is Christ, not we ourselves, who is compassionate and
ecumenical. We with our false compassion would have spared her and sent
her away without her Faith and her cure. It is Christ who gives her
both. "0 woman, great is thy faith. Be it done to thee as thou
wilt."

Theological picking and choosing

There will always be in every movement the false
prophets who want to clean up the problem by sweeping it out of sight;
who seek the slick solution, the quick anodyne, the ready aspirin.
Remove the pain and forget the cause. Solve the mixed marriage problem,
admit the validity of Anglican Orders, allow joint churches, pulpits,
divorce and the pill, and all will be well. All won't be well. We have
removed the very troubles which drive men to seek unity. Non-Catholic
ecumenists are often more aware of this than we give them credit for.
Archbishop Ramsey, praying in the Sistine Chapel, asks God "to
enable us to feel the pain of our division." His predecessor,
Archbishop Fisher, once warned the World Council of Churches that
"united action can become a narcotic rather than a stimulant."
And the Secretary of the same World Council, Dr. Visser t'Hooft warned
everyone against "ecumenical varnish covering up real
differences." It was said of George Bernard Shaw that he sought the
amusing rather than the truthful. It could, likewise be said of false
ecumenism that it is more concerned with avoiding the embarrassing than
promoting the truthful. All of which has produced a theological
unilateralism, a picking and choosing, embracing one truth and ignoring
another which upsets not only the delicate balance of the Faith; but the
delicate conscience of the faithful. The Liturgy, for example, must
always hold its primacy over private devotions and every effort must be
made to secure this. But if, in securing it, there is any denigration or
extermination of private devotion, then we are creating a dangerous back
eddy which could threaten even the Liturgy itself.

Again Altar should balance with Table, Sacrifice with
Meal, Tradition with Scripture, Sacramental Priesthood with the
Priesthood of all believers, Freedom with Responsibility, Personal
Conscience with the Laws of the Church. All these are complementary, as
the red and white corpuscles of the blood stream, and any violent change
in the blood count here, and we have a cancer of the Faith.

Roped to the magisterium

All of which reduces itself to the vital question.
Granted that we must restate all the doctrines of the Church in this new
language, how do we perform this delicate operation without any lack of
balance, without any false accentuation, without any false compassion?
The overriding necessity here is to recognize that speaking this new
language is the most difficult task that the Church has ever assigned
herself. We are exploring new country, cutting new trails, balancing
truth on a razor's edge. It is flatly impossible to do this without
being tightly roped to the magisterium of the Church. This is a
"must". Unfortunately, quite a number of writers look upon the
magisterium as a beetling encumbrance to be circumvented, rather than a
fixed cleat through which all movement is belayed. Strange ideas of
intellectual freedom drawn from other disciplines demand a free climb,
stripped of all the trappings of the magisterium. And all this in the
uncharted regions of the Faith which soar above the level of scientific
demonstration, and where every climber is blind and a potential danger,
unless he is roped to the magisterium. This faculty, like any other
faculty, has its disciplines, and avalanches are caused by fools who
disobey them. The magnificent Pauline phrases, "the glorious
liberty of the children of God"; "the freedom wherewith Christ
has made us free" have been given a new and dangerous twist, a
freedom to disobey. This was never envisaged. It was obedience which
made us free. It was embracing the law with love and personal commitment
which changed it from a cold and barren law into an expression of love.
Again, personal commitment has been so twisted that it becomes our old
friend 'private judgement' under a relevant disguise which cloaks its
old heretical undertones. It has been used as just another name for
doing nothing, accepting nothing, obeying nothing, unless one can see
the reason for it and can be 'personally committed’.

In the eye of the hurricane

"The time will surely come when men will grow
tired of sound doctrine, always itching to hear something new, so that
they will provide themselves with a continuous succession of new
teachers, as the whim takes them." That time has surely come. We
should not be afraid of it. It could be a challenge as well as a danger.
If the ears are itching, it is up to us to speak our old doctrines in a
language which takes care of the itch. This is never easy. It is not
made any easier by those who are too ready to see heresy in very turn of
phrase, or by those who are too ready to repudiate the magisterium. In
this renewal, the magisterium is our only fixed point, Even a revolution
must revolve around something.

Taken from:
L'Osservatore Romano
Weekly Edition in English
20 June 1968, page 5

L'Osservatore Romano is the newspaper of the Holy See.
The Weekly Edition in English is published for the US by: